Be My Hands. Screen recording of one visit, uncut, at real speed, 27 September 2026.
Be My Hands
The machine is the eye, the artist is the hands. Five machine ‘eyes’ each chose fragments from one filmed flip through a 1993 magazine, and she cut and glued exactly as told.draft
Be My Hands reverses the usual division of labour between an artist and a tool. The artist filmed herself turning the pages of one magazine, MAX of June 1993, in six minutes and eleven seconds. Five machine ‘eyes’, each given the temperament of a movement or a method, the Brutalist, the Surrealist, the Dadaist, the Archivist and the Formalist, watched the film and chose what to take: the page, the fragment, the line of the cut. Twenty-five fragments in all, five for each eye.
She cut them by hand and photographed the pieces, and the machine placed each one to the millimetre. She glued them where she was told. Beside each finished collage the machine made its own version of the same brief, blind, without seeing hers, and she made hers without seeing its. The two are shown side by side.
The work asks what authorship means when the choosing and the making are split between two bodies, and one of them has no hands.
Made with Claude Code.